Wednesday, November 6, 2013

A Traveller “Coup Box”

My reading habits as an early teen were pretty far-ranging (if not as obsessional and eclectic as my current ones).
Beyond the standard fantasy/sf obsession and the low-hanging fruit of
approachable literary books for that age (Huxley, Salinger that
sort), one of my well-trod genres was the nexus of thriller, military
adventure and espionage novels inexplicably dumped these days into
the Mystery shelves of bookstores.

And of those books, the novels of Fredrick Forsyth,
Alaistar MacLean and John LeCarre held a prominent place.
LeCarre survived and thrived in my re-readings as an adult, the other
two seemed...well...rather badly written. A few dips back left me
cold—--there's a slow punchline here--until recently.

Randomly
discovering the incredibly stunning story that one of those Forsythe
novels, the Dogs of War, was in fact highly likely to have
been a only-vaguely fictional retelling of Forsyth's own leading
role in a real-life, mercenary-led (and failed) coup in Equatorial Guinea in 1973.

The highly-detailed, methodical,
near-tedious novel—seriously, almost 80 percent of the book is
given over to the logistics of preparing for the operation--suddenly
made a great deal more sense and came onto my gaming radar screen.
Reading it in that light with all the shenanigans of running guns,
smuggling, exploring underworld connections, scouting the site and
the final crescendo of the actual raid made me want to play it so
bad.

So where and how to set it? Traveller
with its wide-open supporting mechanics (hell there is a whole half a
book on how to run mercenary companies) and military-oriented
characters comes to mind

Long-time readers may remember a
million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth, blogs sucked less
and landline telephones were still in use that I ran a Classic
Traveller mini-campaign called imaginatively enough the Space Cantons. There was one news hook that the party never took up that
seems to fit the bill perfectly for this kind of thing:

“A long-anticipated four-sided civil
war has begun with a formal shaking of hands and credit-coin toss on
the Novo Marlankh moon Freedonia . Tensions between the
League for a Micro-Balkanized Moon, ROFF (a Dogoid-rights party), the
Maximalist Party, and the Brotherhood for the Maintenance of the Ways
have been mounting over the last year. The Cantonment Navy has
announced that it will be maintaining an interdiction against
gun-running to the moon with 'occasional rigorousness.'”

The Autokrator, what a dick

So here's the set-up for the “coup
box”, a sandbox bounded by a single mission to overthrow the
current government by any means necessary and a strict
micro-geographical setting. In this case, I am going to go with a
single city-state in the twilight zone of that moon, a miserable
place called Novo Kraldeset (or just Kral by the locals) ruled by a
neutral but authoritarian and batshit crazy warlord called the
Autokrator.

The players will be either hired guns,
scoundrels or idealistic recruits brought in by an ineffectual, yet
affluent group of dissidents, called the Ten, who simply want to
stage a coup and put themselves into benevolent power. In other words
it's “here's a situation, players, go for solving it.”

I'm highly likely running it on Google Plus on
Tuesday nights for six players as a two or so session palate cleanser
for the main Hill Cantons campaign (that's been a bit star-crossed as
of late). If you are interested, drop me a line and some details on
the actual situation report will appear here by Friday.

Interesting. The idea also sort of reminds of the Dr. Who story "War Games" with the 2nd Doctor (Patrick Troughton, not that Tennant chap). That episode features an autocrat known as the War Chief (and I'm strongly resisting the urge to spoil who he really is!).